St Matthew

Titian painted this image of St Matthew in Venice, but we can't be sure when. What's important is to understand the institution for which it was made. Santa Maria della Salute was built to give thanks for the city’s deliverance from plague. The image of Matthew the Evangelist, one of the four authors of the Gospels, connects the institution of the church to a kind of divinely-inspired writing. Note that Matthew holds a stylus and is accompanied by an angel, who ostensibly inspires the words he writes. In its time, Venice was the printing capital of Europe, so this image celebrates the relationship between religious authority and the new institution of print culture. We can only understand this painting if we use historical resources such as church records and printing statistics. That’s how we understand the role of art as contingent on these different social and institutional contexts.